Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/191

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The Jews in the Confederacy. 179

the Confederate Department of State to England to secure ships for blockade service.

Max Fruenthal, of Mississippi, enlisted with the Sixteentr Mississippi Reg-iment at Summit, Miss., and was with Stonewall Jackson in his Valley campaigns, becoming conspicuously dis- tinguished as he calmly loaded and fired with deadly effect, standing in the very apex of the famous Bloody Angle at Spot- sylvania Courthouse.

The brains of the Confederacy is what the historian, Schuyler, calls Judah P. Benjamin, President Davis's most intimate coun- cilor. He was first the Attorney-General of the Confederate States, later, after the resignation of Walker, accepting the port- folio of Secretary of War.

From the cradle of the Confederacy, Montgomery, we know the following Hebrews enlisted;

Charles A. Stern, who as a member of Water's Battery, and who participated in the bloodiest of all battles, Chickamaugua,

being captured there ; A. B. Dehler, L. Lemlee, Myers, Ben

Oppenheimer, the only deaf-mute whom records show ever en- listed in any army^ he saw service under General Joe Wheeler; Jacob Rupenthal, A. Sacmeister, Albert Dreyspring, A. B. Stitler, Shulin, Jacob Briel and Abe Kraus.

In the giving of material aid to the Confederacy, no names stand higher than those of the beloved friends of the soldiers, Mr. and Mrs. Hausman, who will ever be held in grateful re- membrance by the sons and daughters of the men who wore the gray.

In 1863, the great English Hebrew, Disraeli, came to the de- cision that the time had come for England to recognize the South- ern Confederacy. Feeling that the move should come from the Government, he had carefully gathered the data as to our extent of territory, population, productions, what the Confederacy stood for, and her victories, in order to prepare his speech advocating recognition. Disraeli had prepared the speech to be delivered July 6. 1863, but just before that date news was received in Eng- land of the surrender of Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettys- burg, and Disraeli's speech in our favor was never made.